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EXHIBITION BY BILL BEIRNE AND YURI LEIDERMAN, October-November
2000
Leiderman Yuri,
Beirne Bill
RUSSIAN-AMERICAN ART PROJECT
"Cross Currents/ΟΕΠΕΡΕΧΕΝΘί"
Organisators of the project in Russia:
The National Center of contemporary art
Art media center "TV Gallery" (Moscow)
Magazin "Kabinet" (Saint-Petersburg)
October 4 th , 2000 at 18:00
in the ÀÌC "TV Gallery"
opening of the exhibition by Bill Beirne and Yuri Leiderman within the frame of the project "Cross Currents".
"Cross Currents" project was initiated by American curator Leanne Mella in 1998. Its participants are artists who work in all media, including photography, video, drawing, sculpture, and performance: Adam Bartos, Mary Lucier, Judith Âarry, Jac Leirner, and Bill Beirne represent the Americans. Russiann artists participating are Sergei Bugaev Afrika, Vadim Fishkin, Vladimir Kustov,Dimitri Gutov, Yuri Leiderman and Evgeny Eufit. In Moscow and St. Petersburg there have been meetings, lectures and exhibitions by the participating artists working together in pairs. The works produced during the two years of this project will be presented in a planned exhibition in the United States.
Bill Beirne is a conceptual artist known for projects that examine social issues, public space and communication. His work frequently uses surveillance cameras and other technical methods of observation. In August, 1999 his first performance and lecture withYuri Leiderman took place in Moscow. Examples of Beirne's work using surveillance cameras was seen in the exhibition "Frame Scan" at the Polytechnic Museum in May, 2000 organized by the National Center for Contemporary Arts. At the end of September Bill Beirne and Yuri Leiderman held a joint performance in Odessa and presented their work to the art community there at a screening and discussion at the Center for Contemporary Art.
The exhibition at the TV Gallery presents the accumulated works of the year-long collaboration. The Odessa performances were an extension of the themes explored in last year's performance in Moscow. These works have been inspired by the story of Dima Bulychev, the hero of a fantastic tale written by Leiderman about a childhood friend. The real Dima Bulychev died at the age of 17, but in the tale by Leiderman he is resurrected in the form of a robot-android teaching, like Bill Beirne in reality, at a municipal school in New York City. Leiderman's tale was written in 1996, two years before his initial meeting with Beirne.
The two performances in Odessa were prepared separately by each artist. However, both performances were enacted by the two of them working together and following a single route through the city. The basic activity in these performances involved the collection of approximately 50 kilos of chestnuts which the artists then brought back to Moscow. The casual observers of the street performances and the the visitors to the gallery approach the work with two separate and distinct viewpoints about the process. Bill and Yuri, combining private story and public space create two different versions of the same story. In the exhibition, the artists present
documentation in the form of drawings, diagrams, photos, and video as well the objects used in their performances and the chestnuts they collected.
Cross Currents is a sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts, organized by the National Center for Contemporary Arts, Moscow; The Art Media Center "TV Gallery," Moscow, and Kabinet, St. Petersburg.
Major funding has been received from the Trust for Mutual Understanding and the Open Society Institute. The project is supported by the American Embassy in Russia and the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U. S. State Department.
Performances and production in Odessa were organized with the great assistance of The Center for Contemporary Art – Odessa, Mikhail Rashkovetsky, Director; and Ed Kolodiy, Gleb Kachuck, Alexander Shevchuk, and Igor Chatskin.
Special thanks to Richard Lanier and Wendy Newton of the Trust for Mutual Understanding; John Brown and Maria Shustina, The Embassy of the United States of America in Russia; Mikhail Gnedovskiy and Elena Kolovskaya (Open Society Institute), Mikhail Rashkovetsky (CCA – Odessa), Tatiana Gorucheva (TV Gallery) for their help in carrying out the program of Cross Currents.
You can follow development of the project on the site:
www.art.nnov.ru/crosscurrents/
or ask Konstantin Bokhorov in the NCCA:
(+7 095) 299-8142,
e-mail: ncca@aha.ru
The site has been created with the assistance of the "Open Society Institute" (Soros Foundation). Russia
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